Vielmetter Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquisition of Tâm Văn Trần’s If Not For Your Love ll by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

If Not For Your Love ll (2024) is a stoneware sculpture in the shape of a divination jar. Two scenes of colliding characters and forms play out on opposing sides of the vessel. One side depicts a tumultuous seascape filled with vibrant aquatic and airborne organisms, while the other side features an ambling horse in luminous shades of blue and red against a dusky landscape. Scattered among and between these characters are rectangles, lines, and starbursts of thick glaze that alternatingly divide and connect the dynamic creatures.

The chaotic landscapes evoke exhilaration, danger, and beauty – some of the animals bare ferocious teeth and wide, determined eyes, while others cower and camouflage with the surrounding flora. The kaleidoscopic ceramic glaze conjures the disorienting and bewildering experience of migration, something Trần identifies with intimately. The scenes illustrate the chaos of escaping home to an unfamiliar land, the shift from daylight to dusk, the spaces between land, sky, and sea. The characters exist within a compressed space of interconnected relationships, not dissimilar to life in a fish tank or the complexities of a household dynamic. In If Not For Your Love ll, Trần continues his exploration of abstraction, collage and the language of painting, while playfully introducing cartoon-like elements and figures to his raucous compositions.

We want to express our gratitude to the Curatorial Department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for supporting this significant acquisition.

Congratulations to Mary Kelly who has received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts London in recognition of her significant contributions to the feminist and postmodernism art movements.With a career spanning over 4 decades, Mary Kelly is one of the most influential contemporary artists today. Born in 1941, Mary graduated from the College of Saint Teresa in Minnesota, before crossing the Atlantic to study painting in Florence and later attending Central Saint Martins—known at the time as Saint Martin’s School of Art—where she earned a postgraduate certificate in painting.

Not long after graduating, Mary had her first solo show in 1976 at the London Institute of Contemporary Art, where she exhibited her career-defining work Post-Partum Document. The work is now considered one of the most important pieces of feminist conceptual art of the 20th century, exploring the socio-political intersections of identity, motherhood, and feminism. In 1985, Mary became the Artist-in-residence at Kettle’s Yard and Murray Edwards College, where she began work on her large-scale series Interim. She continued to develop the series and exhibited the complete work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 1990.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including a retrospective at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, and major surveys at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. She has also participated in prestigious exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, the Biennale of Sydney, and Documenta 12. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and honorary doctorates from Wolverhampton University, Lund University and the University of the Arts Helsinki.

During her tenure as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, she established the Interdisciplinary Studio program in 1997—pioneering an innovative approach to arts education and research. She currently serves as Judge Widney Professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California.

Mary Kelly in her Studio, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo Credit: Kelly Barrie.

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Hugo McCloud’s work Dislocated Origins (2022-2024) will be on view at the Fenix Museum of Migration in Rotterdam as part of the inaugural exhibition All Directions on view beginning May 16th. Created specifically for the Fenix Museum, McCloud’s work, made out of single-use plastic bags, captures a fragment of the story of movement and migration—a fragment filled with layers, both literal and metaphorical.

“Migrating is a necessity. But walking the same route for generations became a ritual.” – Hugo McCloud

Photo credit: Hugo McCloud, Dislocated Origins, 2023-2024, Collection Fenix ©TITIA HAHNE

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